I HATE this pandemic staycation, but it's no lie that it's given me more time to work on Easter crafts, so there's that, I guess...
Also, handwork soothes my anxiety, gives me and the kids something constructive to focus on, and is something fun that we can do together to make some happy memories. So there's that, I guess!
This particular project also fills an actual Easter need that we have. At our house, the Easter Bunny leads the kids on a giant, far-ranging, whole-morning clue hunt that they have to follow in order to finally find their Easter baskets full of treats. To do that, the Easter Bunny likes to use our family stash of container eggs, but the thing is that I do NOT purchase plastic Easter eggs. Instead, I hoard whatever plastic Easter eggs the kids have happened to receive from other sources over the years. But somehow, some of those plastic Easter eggs walk away every year.
This is such a problem, you guys! A few days ago, we got out our Easter decorations and the younger kid helped me sort them. You want to know how many plastic Easter eggs we found?
Five. You guys, five plastic Easter eggs will not keep my kids busy running around on a clue hunt while my partner and I spend the entire morning in bed.
Obviously, we need more container eggs, and we need to DIY them, and they can't take a ton of time to make (I'd make these papier mache Easter eggs again in a heartbeat, because they were so cute, worked awesomely, and lasted for about five years before I finally composted them, but... they ain't quick to craft!).
It took just a few minutes to think up the idea for these little embroidered felt Easter eggs, and not much longer than that to make them!
The vast majority of the time spent on crafting these eggs is in the embroidering, which you don't even have to do if you don't want to. But this is just about the easiest embroidery project you can think of, so if you've got time to listen to an audiobook and hang out with your kids, I highly recommend doing your Easter eggs up all fancy.
Even better, there's an envelope closure on the back that's also quick and easy to hand-sew with your embroidery floss, and it's secure enough to hold a miniature candy bar, a Hot Wheels car... or a piece of paper with a Very Important Clue written on it!
Here's what you'll need to craft these Easter eggs:
felt. Normally, I use Eco-fi felt, which is made from recycled plastic bottles. For special little handicrafts like this, though, I dip into my very small stash of wool felt that I buy here.
1. Cut out one full egg template, and decorate! You seriously do NOT have to have any sewing or embroidery skills to do this. Just knot one end of the embroidery floss, start it from the back, and get to stitching!
If you think your work looks ugly, the trick is to keep embellishing it! Nothing--I promise you, NOTHING!--can look ugly when it's covered in enough pretty embroidery floss.
I did discover that the kids and I had an easier time thinking of cute embellishments when we lightly chalked some curved lines for our stitching to follow. Chalk will rinse right off of felt with a little running water, so it's a good choice for drawing any kind of pattern or template directly onto the felt egg front.
2. Make two more partial egg templates. In the photo below, you can see that I've got one full egg front, and two different egg backs that overlap each other by a couple of inches in the middle:
That overlap is important, because it's your envelope closure. To make it, first pin the bottom egg piece lined up with the bottom of your egg front, then pin the top egg piece lined up with the top of the egg front. Blanket stitch all the way around the egg to make it look like this:
If you wanted to hang this egg, you'd just have to stitch embroidery floss through the top and tie it into a loop.
If you wanted to stuff the egg, you'd just have to cut out one complete egg back (perhaps you could embellish that, too!), blanket stitch the two together, and stuff it before you'd quite finished stitching it completely closed.
The kids and I have a few more of these in progress, and plans to embroider some more together later today while we listen to Dracula (we finished Pride and Prejudice a couple of days ago, and now we get to watch the Colin Firth miniseries together!!!).
I hope the Easter Bunny finds them useful, and that none of them wander away...
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
I HATE sewing these re-usable fabric face masks, and I hate seeing my family wear them.
I mean, they're not hard or unpleasant or tedious to sew or anything, and the designs look fine and fit well and everyone says they're comfortable, but I hate everything about this pitiful, uncertain shot in the dark in the face of a global pandemic.
Or, in Syd's case, when she's chilling on the couch reading the instructions for her new DIY screenprinting kit:
I'm not going to tell you how to sew these face masks, because I don't want to be responsible for you. Instead, I'm gong to tell you how, when I wasn't busy reading every book ever written, *I* sewed these face masks, roughly following the tutorial printed in my local newspaper, since this is also the type of re-usable fabric face mask that local medical establishments, nursing homes, and non-profits that serve the community are asking for.
For each mask, I used two pieces of 100% cotton quilting fabric, cut to 6"x 9", and two pieces of elastic around 1/8" to 1/4" wide, cut to 6.5" long. I later learned that although Syd is taller than me, she has a petite face, and her elastic probably should have been 5" long at the max. She shortened her own elastic to make her mask fit her well.
I've used both 1/8" elastic and 1/4" elastic, and found that the stretch matters more than the width. For a couple of family masks, I used 1/4" elastic that I pulled out of a super old fitted sheet as I was ripping it up for kitchen rags, and the super old, super soft, super stretchy elastic worked great. For a friend, though, I made another four masks using new 1/4" elastic, and it turned out to be too stiff and uncomfortable to be practical.
I put the two pieces of 6" x 9" fabric right sides together, then pinned the elastic to the corners. I started by folding back the top piece of fabric, and placing the elastic where I wanted it against the front of the bottom fabric:
I wanted it to be at an angle like that so that I didn't catch more than the end of it when I was sewing the fabric pieces together.
I pinned one end of the elastic just to the bottom fabric--
--straightened it out, because twisted elastic would be NO fun behind the ears--
--and then pinned the other end to the corner below it:
I repeated this with the other elastic on the other end of the mask, and then I pinned the top fabric down, sandwiching the elastic between the two fabrics.
I sewed around the perimeter of the mask, leaving an approximately 3" opening for turning and backstitching over the elastic at the corners:
I clipped the corners to reduce bulk--
--and then turned the mask right side out. I finger-pressed the raw edges of the opening to the inside to match the seam, then ironed the mask flat.
I edge-stitched along the top and bottom of the mask only, once again backstitching when I stitched over the elastic. Those little buggers are not coming off!
Because I used a 1/4" seam to sew the mask together, I was left with a flat mask that was approximately 5.5" tall. From the bottom, I pinched the mask at 1.5", then brought that fold down to the .5" mark, ironed it to crease it, and pinned it:
Next, I pinched the fabric at the 2.5" mark, folded it down until this second fold butted up to the first fold, then ironed and pinned it:
I never did figure out how to get my tucks perfectly even, so for the third tuck, I just pinched the fabric 1" from the top, brought it down until that fold butted up to the second fold, then ironed and pinned it:
Eh, they're not totally noticeably uneven, and you can't see the tucks when we're wearing them, anyway.
The only remaining task was to sew down both sides, stitching those tucks in place:
With my fifth mask, I started backstitching every time I sewed over a fold, and I think they look a lot sturdier.
Here are our family masks in all their glory:
And here's me about to low-key risk my life and the lives of my family for a trip to the grocery store!
At least we bought enough food that, barring emergencies, we shouldn't have to shop again for a month.
And by that, I mean that we bought a bunch of delicious food that we'll eat all of in a week, and then we'll go back to the rice and beans and cheese that we already had in the house for the three weeks after that.
Easter is a good holiday for baking and crafting. Nobody but the Easter Bunny has to worry about presents, so there's no shopping or making, nobody is coming over, so there's no cleaning or decorating, and it's not one of our feast days, so there's no huge amount of cooking--give me white yeast rolls, a ham, and some chocolate bunny to gnaw, and I'm good for Easter!
So Easter, for us, is a super fun time of baking ridiculous treats and decorating endless eggs. I don't know what about that we all find so entertaining, but year after year, there it is--endless eggs! There's always something new to do with just one more dang egg!
Here, then, is the master list of my Easter tutorials. I loved compiling this list, because it took me back for years of Easters past, years of little faces focused in concentration as they do one more weird thing to one more endless egg, years of little feet stomping around and little hands picking Easter eggs out of their hiding places. Feel free to reminisce with me:
felted wool Easter eggs. We did these way back when I was into felting with the kids. It's been years since I've felted wool, but it's just now occurred to me that I bet Syd would LOVE needle felting...
chalkboard Easter eggs. This is our most recent Easter project, and Syd has been playing with it daily.
blown-out Easter eggs. The process is kind of gross, but I love that you can then keep the finished and decorated egg forever. They're delicate, but they won't rot.
woodburned and stained Easter eggs. As much as I cherish the memory of the cute little projects that my little babies got up to, I really enjoy making these more sophisticated crafts with them. Woodburned Easter eggs look really cool!
stained wooden Easter eggs. This is my go-to liquid watercolor staining method. It's brilliant, and looks awesome.
papier mache Easter eggs. If you're not into plastic Easter eggs, you have GOT to make these. You can hinge them so that they still open for treats!
tissue paper decoupaged Easter eggs. These can be kind of fiddly, but we use pre-cut squares of tissue paper, and that makes it a lot easier.
tie-dyed Easter eggs.This is a weird little activity for when you're tired of just dunking your eggs to dye them.
cascarones. We made these last year as Spawn Eggs for Syd's Minecraft-themed birthday party, but they're traditionally an Easter craft.
egg dye volcanoes. After you finish dyeing eggs, pour more vinegar into the dye bath, spread a layer of baking soda onto a cookie sheet, and let the kids go! I still remember how joyfully Syd played with this.
I didn't realize how many projects I had until I was almost finished--apparently we really do try a couple of brand-new Easter crafts every year!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
I didn't actually want more time to hang out at home and read to come at the price of a global pandemic, I hope you understand. I'm pretty sure that Will's the only person in our family whose sanity is not hanging on by a thread at this point, honestly.
But yeah... I got a lot of reading done in March!
Surprisingly, this was my favorite non-fiction book of the month:
Ken Jennings' main claim to fame is his Jeopardy win (he also sometimes Tweets ugly things about people, apparently, so great job there, Genius), but this book is a surprisingly interesting ethnography of maps. It's an anecdotal history of why maps were created, how they're used, how and why they interest people, and how they affect and reflect the ways that our brains work. It got me thinking a lot about spatial reasoning and how overlooked its importance often is in our contemporary society. On the one hand, many kids now don't tend to go out to play and explore vast swathes of neighborhoods like they often used to, unsupervised, but on the other hand, my two can find their way around their little Minecraft world, and the last time I picked up the controller to try a game with a 3D world (it was a Zelda game belonging to a baby cousin, and I was SUPER excited because I LOVE ZELDA), I couldn't even parse what I was looking at. I just kept walking Link into the side of a mountain, confused, while my cousin laughed at me. And then I felt nauseated.
Tl;dr: spatial reasoning is very important for brains. Visual puzzles, wayfinding, outdoor exploration, and mapreading make us smarter!
I got another Aubrey/Maturin book read in March--
--but alas, even with all of this time at home to read, I only got that one Aubrey/Maturin book read. I'd sort of figured that the public library would close due to the pandemic, but I didn't quite have the jump on it, so Will and I weren't able to run in and hoard every book before it did close, indefinitely. And they closed their online holds requests, so I can't even tell them the books that I really want them to get for me when they do re-open. AND they also closed their book drops, so Will and I are collecting a HUGE stack of returns on our front hallway counter.
First-world problems, amiright? We're all healthy and safe, able to shelter in place, the children's schooling hasn't been disrupted, and we have a huge home library and over a hundred library books already checked out that we can read. Also internet access.
Not gonna lie, though: I REALLY WANT TO READ DESOLATION ISLAND RIGHT NOW!!!
What I did get from the library in time, however, and read avidly, and love even more than I remember loving them as a young child, are these Ramona books:
I loved Ramona when I was a little kid, and I'm sure that I re-read her multiple times in high school, during long shifts working as a page in my public library's children's department on those weeknights after the town's kids were all in bed but the library didn't close for another hour. But I don't think that I loved her as much as I loved her this time, re-reading her at 40+ years old, raising two daughters of my own. Ramona has such big feelings! And as a parent, I think that I am outraged on her behalf for every little injustice in her world even more than I was outraged for her when I was her own age! When I was a kid, I was all, "Yep, teachers are mean. Parents are unfair. Sucks when people won't let you read." But now, I'm all, "Why on EARTH would that teacher praise one child's wise old owl craft and not the others?!? How DARE their father mock his children for wanting him to quit smoking!!! Can those parents seriously not find another place to park their child every single day after school other than with that babysitter who doesn't like them and also has a four-year-old that Ramona has to entertain the whole time she's there? All she wants to do is READ, goddamnit! Let the child READ!!!"
I also think I'd forgotten about how much economic class plays into the background. Ramona's parents begin the series as parents who aren't college graduates, although they seem to be well-enough off. They're a one-salary family who are able to own a home, and there are depictions of little luxuries that let you know that they've got some spending room in their budget. But when they need a major home renovation, Ramona's mother also gains paid employment, and Ramona has to submit to an unenthusiastic neighborhood babysitter and has less unstructured play time and fewer extracurricular enriching experiences. And then her dad loses his job, and gets a new one as a grocery store check-out clerk, and Ramona's life becomes more unpredictable, with her father working unusual hours and not home on typical vacation days, and their budget becomes so constrained that at times Ramona borders on food insecurity. She's stressed by adult worries that trickle down to her, and she doesn't always have a safe outlet for her big emotions, and sometimes she's the brunt of someone else's anxiety coming out. It's a LOT for a little kid!
And yet this is, or parts of it are, the normal day-to-day reality for lots of kids, and so even when there are upheavals, Ramona's life reads as normal. She goes about her business, has her own adventures, only semi-aware of what the adults are doing in the background to keep things going. There's a scene in a beauty school where they've gone for Beezus to spend her own money on a haircut, and a stylist wants to cut Ramona's hair, too. Ramona is savvy enough about her family's economic realities to automatically refuse, and she even repeats a phrase that she's undoubtedly heard repeatedly--"We're scrimping and saving to make ends meet." But it's clear that she doesn't really know what she's parroting so much as know that's what you say when something costs money. And in the background, we can clearly see her mother debating the question: haircuts cost money, and she can cut Ramona's hair herself. But free time is also precious, and working full-time, caring for the kids solo while her husband works odd evening and weekend hours, cooking all their meals from scratch from cheap groceries, doesn't leave her with much of it. If she paid for a haircut, she'd have a little more time on her hands, but would she then have to work harder to figure out where that money is going to come from and how to save it somewhere else?
We don't see all that, of course, because we're following Ramona, who's VERY intent on this brand-new haircut experience and how awesome she feels about herself afterwards, and we're thrilled that she, too, got a rare treat, but we do see later that Beezus and her mother are sitting down together learning how to do fancy haircuts at home, and as far as we know they never go to another hair salon.
These books have layers, y'all. They are VERY much worth an adult re-read.
Here's what else I read in March!
The pandemic stay-at-home order has affected Will's reading very different than it's affected mine, the poor kid. Will relies on a regular influx of new books to read; even though we own hundreds of books, she rarely re-reads a book. That's the main reason why our home library isn't hundreds of books larger, and why I never give my reading obsessed-kid books as a present. Will has read through the three or so days' worth of library books that she had on hand when the library closed, and has reluctantly re-read some titles from our home library, but mostly she's at loose ends.
It was fun to see Will rediscover this old favorite, though!
She was SO into Dinotopia a full decade ago! This series was one of the first books that she devoured after her reading ability really exploded and left her as a fully literate five-year-old--you know how many books there are that are appropriate for a fully literate five-year-old?!?
A lot fewer than the books that are NOT appropriate for a fully literate five-year-old, I'll tell you that!
Here are Will's other March favorites:
Will claims to have loved The Swiss Family Robinson, but I sat near her as she zoomed through it one Saturday morning out on our back deck in the sunshine, and while Matt and I read the newspaper, did the crossword, and ate breakfast burritos, and Syd hung out near us with the less neurotic of her two cats, Will regaled us with absurdity after absurdity from the book ("OMG all those animals do not all live on that island together!!! Oh, please, you're going to pretend to be a boy just because you're embarrassed you don't have a skirt?!?). The kid riding the ostrich apparently doesn't even rate in the top twenty of most absurd events in the book!
Here's everything else Will read in March!
My favorite podcast in March is a podcast that I didn't know was a podcast! I normally listen to All Songs Considered on the radio, but it's way more convenient as a podcast. Their New Music Friday episode has now become my time to deep clean the kitchen, then I can move onto the rest of the house while listening to whatever was my favorite from the episode--this week, it's this album!
Our YouTube time was only slightly curtailed by the absolutely blissful two weeks that I spent enjoying a free Disney+ trial. I had no plans to actually buy Disney+ (we are scrimping and saving to make ends meet!), so I watched the SNOT out of it for two full weeks! I discovered along the way that I can basically just happily stream Moana as background noise--that's how much I love it. Also Tangled. The only shows I'd really wanted to make a point to watch were The Mandalorian, which was AWESOME and I actually probably will buy a month of Disney+ just to watch the next season when it comes out, and Avatar, so Will would know what we're looking at if we end up going to Animal Kingdom during our upcoming October Florida adventure. But somehow we ended up not actually finishing Avatar... it's awfully dated now, don't you think? Nobody had much patience with the White Savior shtick running through it, and I do NOT blame them, sigh.
But really, there's rarely need to pay for a streaming service when YouTube exists!
The other day, I was reminiscing (as I often do) about the absolutely fantastic birthday party that I had at McDonald's when I was a little kid, and I randomly wondered if McDonald's still hosts birthday parties. Reader, it DOES! But as I was Googling this, I accidentally got onto the website for McDonald's in New Zealand, and THEN I became obsessed with McDonald's regional menu offerings.
Thank goodness there's a YouTube video for that!
Syd got me into watching this woman's fashion design videos, and she is EPIC:
She and I also tried to go down a rabbit hole of watching dollhouse makeover videos, but we're frustrated because we hate most of them. We love this series, though:
And that's what I looked at in March when I wasn't curled up in an anxiety ball on my bathroom floor! What are YOU looking at when you're not in anxiety ball form?
